Communication systems, and particularly cellular communication systems, are well known. Cellular communication systems, as is known, consist of individual cell sites, each equipped to communicate with mobile communication units located within the cell site. Communication in a cell site is conducted over a communication resource, often referred to as a communication channel, which may consist of a pair of radio frequencies which are used by the mobile communication unit to transmit and receive information with the cell site transceiver. Several of the communication resources may be dedicated to particular functions such as two-way transmission of control information. The total number of communication resources, however, are limited.
In planning cellular radiotelephone systems there is a never ending tension among maximizing system capacity, providing Carrier-to-Interference (C/I) immunity, meeting cell-to-cell hand-off topography, and etc. This is due primarily to the scarce radio spectrum available. To increase capacity, the limited number of communication resources are repeatedly reused at different cell sites throughout the cellular communication system. However, higher resource reuse adversely affects C/I and may not be possible because of hand-off criteria. Thus the system operator is left with the very difficult task of allocating resources to the cells in the most efficient way possible. This task, however, is very labor intensive and iterative at best. Once resources are allocated within a system, tuning of the system to reduce the effects of interfering resources or adding/removing resources from cells to balance capacity is often not performed even though system performance suggests that it should be.
Therefore, a need exists for a method of allocating and reallocating communication resources to cells of a communication system which accounts for the various criteria which must be satisfied within the system without consuming an inordinate amount of time and resources.